DualAlign LLC is a startup that is leveraging RPI like perhaps no other company in recent memory.

Some of the technology--four patents--is licensed from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and developed by its founder, Charles Stewart, a 47-year-old RPI professor.

Its CEO is Remy Arteaga, a recent alumnus of Rensselaer's MBA program.

Its first employee is Gehua Yang, a research computer scientist and former student of Stewart's at Rensselaer.

Its adviser--and the person who urged the founder to create the company--is a Rensselaer alumnus and professor.

DualAlign, located in Clifton Park, is also an affiliate of Rensselaer's noted business incubator, which is playing a key role in connecting the company with potential clients--overseas.

"Without RPI, there's no Dual-Align, there's no technology, no commercialization of the technology," Arteaga said. "That's what you want, that symbiotic relationship. ... They extend our resources."

What DualAlign software does is allow users who take multiple photos of an area to align them. So, for example, if you took several photos of the Grand Canyon to create a panoramic view, rather than piece them together, it aligns them in the proper scale. During presentations, Arteaga shows a photo of a church in Troy taken from different angles and then puts the photos altogether, capturing the church's surroundings.

That technology also has medical applications. DualAlign has used the technology to detect early glaucoma by tracking the changes in an eye. That's one of the benefits of DualAlign's technology--it can show changes taking place over time.

And the applications for the product keep expanding, said Arteaga. National Grid has expressed interest in testing the DualAlign software to monitor potential hot spots at substations.

All three products fall into the company's three core areas: medical imagery, photographic imagery and thermo imagery.

Stewart has received $1.5 million in National Science Foundation funding, and $200,000 from the National Institutes of Health, to further develop the technology.

It's tough to get a handle on just how big this market is as digital cameras and camera phones become more and more prevalent. Lyra Research Inc. of Newtonville, Mass., projects that the worldwide revenue for digital photo prints alone will hit $16 billion in 2010.

Convinced to start a company

Stewart is the researcher behind the technology. Considered an expert in computer vision, Stewart developed aspects of the Dual-Align technology back in 1999. The product converts computer vision technology into software applications.

It was when Stewart met with Gregory Hughes, now an adviser and investor in the company, that Stewart decided more needed to be done with the technology. Hughes is a former AT&T executive, Rensselaer alum and now professor.

He convinced Stewart to turn his technology into a business.

"The technology was so successful in so many different ways, it was forced upon me," Stewart said of starting the company. "People kept telling me, 'You've really got to do something with this.' After the fourth or fifth time, I said, 'OK, I'm going to do this.' "

Hughes doesn't hold back when talking about DualAlign.

"I think that this is the most important entrepreneurial idea to come out of RPI in a decade--and I work with many of the startups in the incubator, and I teach all the capstone courses in the MBA program, so I see lots of them," Hughes said.

He noted that CEO Arteaga was one of his former students--and the best in his class.

Hughes said the multiple applications for the technology make it an attractive company to be involved with. He named other industries that DualAlign isn't even talking about yet, such as security and defense applications.

'RPI family coming together'

Commercializing technology has been a major emphasis at Rensselaer, as well as creating companies around technology developed at Rensselaer.

Chuck Rancourt, Rensselaer's director of the office of technology commercialization, said that's been a major push at the institute in recent years. DualAlign and Rensselaer are finalizing the licensing agreement.

He said the technology has potential--and so does the company.

"The team they've put together--they've got the ingredients, good people, good technology and they've developed a plan that we're excited about."

Rancourt said Rensselaer has played a big role in a number of companies, including nanomaterials maker Applied NanoWorks Inc. in Rensselaer and video game developers Vicarious Visions in Menands. He called the Dual-

Align story "another good example of the RPI family coming together to make these kinds of opportunities."

Arteaga said the significance of Rensselaer to the business can't be underplayed.

"We wanted to have a good relationship with RPI," said Arteaga, who said DualAlign is his sixth startup and his second time as CEO.

He said Rensselaer's incubator helped DualAlign make connections with a potential French client. Incubator representatives who were in France last year visiting businesses did a good enough job selling DualAlign that the French company came to visit DualAlign last month.

"We like that connection" with Rensselaer, he said.

Arteaga said DualAlign feels so strongly about Rensselaer's role in the company that it plans on paying royalties even on technology not directly developed at the institute.

He said companies often try and revise their intellectual property in such a way as to avoid having to license technology from universities. But Arteaga said the company is so tied to Rensselaer, it wants the school to benefit too.

"[Founder and chief technology officer] Chuck wanted RPI to benefit from anything we did," he said. "We're going to pay royalties as a way of giving something back to the university. We don't have to do it. We'll be the nice guys in the industry."

Lessons Learned

CEO Remy ArteagaWhat lessons have you learned since starting the company last year?The ability to communicate what the technology's benefits are. We were struggling to communicate what the technology even was. We didn't even know how to describe it in a way that makes sense to anybody. We learned that quite effectively. How do you describe your technology?Our software is image recognition software. It's about being able to detect similar images.Where do you see DualAlign in five years?In five years we should be a company that is focused on one [market], generating $30 [million] to $50 million and is at the perfect place to be acquired by a medical image company or whichever market we end up focusing on.